Free Republic

We should have lost the Venona Transcripts, intercepts of Soviet cold-war espionage activity. Word came down from the FDR White House to kill the Venona program, perhaps under the influence of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau who had an important assistant in secret-Communist Harry Dexter White. As it was the military officials responsible for the intercepts continued to accumulate them and the accuracy of Senator Joseph McCarthy's estimates of Communist infiltration of the State Department would ultimately be confirmed nearly to a "T". Military Intelligence revealed itself in that instance not to be an oxymoron. Every shift of the Joint Chiefs...

The Bard tells us, rightly, that the past is prologue. But until America's greatest military intelligence success -- and failure -- becomes common knowledge Americans will remain intellectual sitting ducks, herded hither and yon, hoping to build a sheltering future on shaky misinformation. I'm talking about the Venona Code intercepts: The 3000 encrypted communications between Soviet spies operating in this country and their masters in Moscow, which American and British code breakers began deciphering in 1946. These KGB messages revealed that the Soviets had agents at the highest levels of the executive and legislative branches of our government -- and...